When to test

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Always

A lot of people seem to struggle with knowing when to test their code. The simple answer is always, and everything.

Always test every line of code that you write.

Know that your code works (and interacts) as expected

First and foremost, writing tests provides you with a safety net. Making changes and refactoring code becomes a calculated maneuver, instead of a guessing game. Stop asking yourself: Did I break something? And know that if the tests didn't break, you're safe.

When you first write a block of code, manual testing might be sufficient to ensure that it works correctly, because its purpose is fresh in your mind. But, what about all the code it interacts with? Can you possibly remember test for all of the things you might have affected? Can the next user of your code remember to test for all of the things they might have affected? Of course not, and that's exactly why it's up to you to build those tests for them.

Living proof

Take a look at this snippet that got checked in to svn today:

belongs_to :user, :company

Had the author of this code written tests for his code, or even run the generated test suite for his model, he might have realized that he'd made a typo, and that the belongs_to method doesn't accept multiple models as its first argument, and that the correct code would have looked like this:

belongs_to :user
belongs_to :company

Test first, test always.

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